I’ve decided that “Security” will be the main theme of my happiness project, and I think that it is an especially important issue for people aged 17-21 (as well as young adults).

Speaking from experience:

A lot of times, people start to lose their sense of ideals and belief, due to it being crushed by the weight of reality and world’s expectation. For example, you’d be saying “The world is a happy place if you accept yourself as who you are, as well as accepting others!”. As you age and experience more things, you’ll start to doubt, “How can I accept myself if I don’t know who I am?” “Others do not accept me for who I am, why accept them for who they are?”. This is a point where insecurity arises, and as a result – unhappiness. People begin to touch up their look, because they start to care about how people judge them. They start to care about what everybody say about them, loses their confidence along the way.

I think this is especially true for people as they begin to step into the 17-year-old zone, because it is the beginning point where people start to think very seriously about life, what they want to do, who they are. This concerns finding self-identity, discovering things about themselves, and when they don’t (which is often the case) they get incredibly insecure, or take the wrong approach in “inventing” an image for themselves. I think this is because people these age are too busy taking care of school work and campus assignments, they don’t have much chance to do self-exploration and seeing the world in a different perspective. Not even many adults have discovered it, and very rarely that they have a sense of self-certainty about who they are and what they really want in life. This emotional insecurity causes dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and sometimes even depression (to those more melancholic folks). This is why I think having emotional security is very important in attaining happiness. Being secure about yourself is the best way to be happy in life. Knowing who you are, your limitations and how to overcome them and develop yourself from that point.

It’s not that being secure means there aren’t any problems – life is filled with problems, and no one can change that. People have to change for them. When you’re secure, you’ll deal with these problems with the right attitude – finding appropriate ways to solve them, the way you know how to.

These emotional security needs to be supported by external factors that makes people feel secure as well – friends, partner, caring family, or things as simple as bringing powerbank when you’re planning to stay out of house for the whole day.

The definition to my happiness, when summed in a few words, would be “happiness is security inside out”. Emotional security, and the external factors that support them.